Say it ain't so, Geo.

George McEvoy on Joe Torre, Babe Ruth:

(A)nother dark cloud that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of decent fans is the lousy way the Yankees' organization - supposedly the class act of baseball - has treated Joe Torre.

All Joe did was manage the team with dignity, win or lose. He knows what it means to be a Yankee. The "suits'' now running things never will understand that feeling.

But this is nothing new for the Yankees.

When Babe Ruth was riding high, hitting more home runs by himself than some entire teams could achieve, they got a lot of great publicity by raising the Bambino's salary to $85,000. That was in the '20s, when the income tax was so low, it was almost invisible.

Several years ago, I sat in a coffee shop in Silver Spring, Md., with Joe Judge, the longtime first baseman for the old Washington Senators, and asked him whether he and Babe's other contemporaries weren't resentful of the huge salary he was getting.

"Not at all,'' Joe replied. "We loved the Babe. Every time he got a raise, we got one, too. He improved things for everybody.''

But then the 1930s came. The Babe got older and slower. What the fans didn't know was that after he reached the $85,000 salary, the suits started cutting his pay. Because he never again reached 60 home runs, the salary was reduced even when he belted 47 out of the park.

He slowed down as he neared 40. He asked to manage the team after Miller Huggins died. They offered to let him manage the Yankee farm team in Newark, N.J. They knew he couldn't take that. Babe Ruth in the minor leagues?

No way.

They offered him a pittance. They might as well have hung a sign on him saying, "Washed Up.'' He was booed in Yankee Stadium. He joined the old Boston Braves, hit three homers in one game, but generally got more laughs than applause. He coached briefly with the Brooklyn Dodgers and then left baseball for good.